Latinx Artist Fellowship

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Christina Fernandez

Artist and activist

Los Angeles

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My current research investigates communities of color in inland Southern California, and how their histories intersect with the region’s agricultural, cultural, and legal histories, including discriminatory practices registered in public spaces and housing.

Photographer and educator Christina Fernandez explores her personal connection to Los Angeles in her body of work. The city and its environs are featured as an important backdrop for her works that address labor, gender, migration, and her Chicanx identity. Her urban and landscape photography conveys social and political commentaries and speaks to the interplay between private and public spaces. Text and staged photographs, using a type of self-portraiture, depict mythical and historical figures. Coming from an artistic and activist family, her history in the Chicanx community and her participation in the arts community have deeply influenced her work as an artist.

Fernandez earned a BA at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1989, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1996. Since 2000, she has taught at Cerritos College, a majority Latinx community college, where she is an associate professor and was chair of the art department from 2017 to 2020. Her projects have been featured in major group exhibitions including Home—So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017), Our America, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2013), East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous, Santa Monica Museum of Art (2000), and InSite, San Diego and Tijuana (1997). Her work is in public and private collections, including the Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures, a major traveling exhibition surveying more than 30 years of her work, will open at the UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography in Riverside in fall 2022.

Selected Works

Sepia landscape mounted as a wall mural with five smaller sepia images displayed horizontally over the wall mural in between wall text.
Three photographs installed on a large sepia wall mural: two photographs depicting landscapes flank an image of a nude woman’s back with hands stretched behind her.
A billboard suspended over a building in the evening shows an image of a discarded couch juxtaposed against a “For sale” sign overlooking rolling hills and homes.